One Potato, Two Potato
by Magical Me
Summary: The first question Harry can remember asking his aunt and uncle is how he got his scar. How exactly did that come about?


One Potato, Two Potato  
***  


  
As a four-year-old Harry Potter waddled around the house, he tried as hard as he could to concentrate on his game. In the room directly to the right of the stairs, loud music and bangs from four-year-old Dudley's computer were seeping through the cracks in the door, ever reminding Harry of his 'place' in the Dursley household. Dudley's father and mother were in the old spare room as well, cooing over their lump of a son and offering him advice and cookies. That didn't help.  
  
Harry knew that he was different from Dudley. Not only in the normal sense, like the way they looked and acted, for even a two-year-old can spot these things easily, but in the sense that even though he and his cousin lived in the same house, shared the same clothes (unfortunately for Harry, because Dudley's clothes would fit a twelve-year-old sooner than a fellow boy of four years), and were fed the same food (even thought Dudley got more of it), Harry didn't, and couldn't, have everything Dudley had.  
  
Harry didn't understand why he had to call the grownups 'Aunt' and 'Uncle', while Dudley called them 'Mum' and 'Dad'. He didn't understand why Dudley didn't know the sting of a harsh world, while he had to endure the pain numerous times each day. He didn't understand why Dudley got to play on his computer for hours on end, while he was screamed at for even touching it.   
  
Trying to explain the concept of love to anyone is difficult. Trying to explain it to someone who has scarcely felt it is more so. Trying to explain it to a four-year-old who can't ever remember being looked at in a kind way is near impossible. And yet perhaps Harry might have understood. I say might have, because no one had ever bothered to try.  
  
Shaking his tiny, thick-haired head, Harry tottered further down the cream carpeted hallway, attempting to escape the sounds issuing forth from Dudley's extra room. He had to stop letting his mind wander, and start playing his game again, because wandering minds were bad, as he was reminded daily by his question-hating relatives, and games were good.  
  
He played this game often, whenever he found himself with a patch of time before his next duties. Dudley, Aunt, and Uncle were never in the game. Instead, there was a girl with long black hair and bright green eyes, just like his. And there was a man, also with Harry's unruly black hair and green eyes, who always stood with a woman who looked just like an older version of the little girl.  
  
In the game, Harry and the girl played for hours on end on a computer that looked suspiciously like the one in the room just down the hall, while the man and the woman cooed over them and fed them cookies. Everyone smiled at each other, and whenever Harry beat a game, the woman would hold him close, and then the man would swing him over his shoulders, laughing heartily. The girl would just stand by, gaping at them, eyes wide and bright with admiration.  
  
Of course, after a while, they would all grow bored of the computer, and that was when the girl would ask Harry to play tea party with her. Harry would grimace and roll his eyes, but he always agreed to play in the end, because it was obvious that the girl really wanted him to, and it was so nice to feel wanted.  
  
"Harry! Come down to the kitchen this instant, young man, you were supposed to have started scrubbing the potatoes half an hour ago!"  
  
Speaking of feeling wanted...  
  
Annoyed, Harry wobbled down the steps on his knobby-kneed legs. He hated scrubbing the potatoes. Aunt Petunia always managed to get the biggest ones in the market, and he could never quite manage to get a good hold on them with his small hands.   
  
"There you are," spat his aunt ill temperedly. "I thought we'd had the no shirking duties discussion before. That's one less bit of chicken for you tonight. If you don't stop standing there idly and get to work it'll be two."  
  
Supposing that to be the end of the lecture, Harry dragged the stool that was always kept next to the counter on the far side of the room over to the sink and clambered on top of it, leaning over to turn on the faucet. He sighed, picking up the first potato and wetting it down.   
  
One potato, two potato, three potato, four. I don't think that I can take this anymore.   
  
Resisting the urge to throw the vegetable in his hand at his aunt, who was currently blowing on a pot of boiling water, Harry turned his head to the window. It was just beginning to grow dark outside, and black shadows danced across the white wall of the house belonging to the next-door neighbors.   
  
He could also see his own reflection in the window, scowling back at him, potato in hand. The tips of Dudley's old, faded black shirt were soaking wet-they were so long Harry had drenched them bending over to change the temperature of the water. His hair, as usual, was sticking out at odd angles, impossibly thick and amazingly adorable, although no one had ever told him that. His glasses were much too big for him, and he had to slide the round frames up his nose every few seconds.  
  
But it was the mark above his glasses that really caught his attention. His scar was the only thing about the way he looked that he really liked. Exactly like a lightning bolt. Every once in a while, he would lose his focus on whatever he happened to be doing, and he'd run his fingers over his forehead, feeling the thin mark. Something that Dudley couldn't ever have.  
  
And then, quite suddenly, the desire to know how he'd received that mark crept into Harry's head, going from wonder to absolute obsession in only a few seconds.   
  
He glanced quickly over at his aunt, who was now dropping pinches of salt into her concoction. Harry rather fancied that she looked like some sort of wicked witch, brewing a poisonous potion. He'd have to be careful not to eat any of that stuff tonight. Did he dare ask her? Of course he didn't. She hated talking to Harry, especially when he was working. Was it worth it?  
  
No.  
  
Er...maybe.  
  
Well...almost.  
  
Okay-yes.  
  
"Aunt Petunia?"  
  
She lifted her pointed face slightly, and made a faint noise, which Harry took as an okay to go on.  
  
"D'you-d'you know where I got my scar?"  
  
There, it was out.  
  
There was total silence for about a second. Then his aunt shook her head once and told him, "In the car crash when your parents died. And don't ask questions."  
  
Don't ask questions. How was Harry expected to do that when there was so much he was simply aching to know? Angrily, he shook out his wet hands, spraying water all over the polished wood floors, half hoping his aunt would notice. But she didn't, so he went back to scrubbing potatoes.  
  
They had died in a car crash, then. His parents. His parents that wanted him. That smiled at him and hugged him and cooed over him, only even more than Dudley's parents did for Dudley. A car crash. Such a stupid way to die. Stupid, stupid, stupid.   
  
He bet they'd done everything they could to stay there for him. He bet they'd fought as hard as they could. He bet they'd been incredibly brave, just for him. It hadn't been their fault. He bet they'd never even cried. They'd just accepted fate for what it was, and swallowed their tears, so he wouldn't see them cry and cry too. And in their last seconds, he bet they'd thought about how much they'd loved him. No, he didn't bet. He knew.  
  
And that was when it happened. A sudden, blinding flash of bright green light burst forth in Harry's memory, causing him to stumble backwards and fall off the edge of his stool, landing with a thud on his bottom. The potato in his hand flew across the room and hit his aunt right in the back of her head, causing her to drop her wooden spoon right into the boiling water in surprise, creating a splash large enough to give four-year-old Dudley, who had just entered the kitchen, a huge burn on his even more huge right hand.  
  
For a moment, there was no sound in the room, save the slight simmering of the recently invaded water. Then everything happened at once. Dudley began screaming at the top of his lungs. His mother, caught between comforting her son and screaming at her nephew, did the best job she could at doing both at the same time. Her husband, distracted from his television program in the next room, came crashing into the kitchen, causing thundering bangs as he knocked over three of the chairs around the table.   
  
And before Harry knew it, he had been dragged to his feet by his towering uncle, and practically tossed out of the room and up the stairs. Not that it really mattered or anything.   
  
At least he was out of washing the potatoes.  


***  


  



End file.
